Dalit history has seen something of a scholarly resurgence in the last few years, and Rupa Viswanath's book makes an important contribution to it. Literally “ground down” or “broken,” “Dalit” is a term of political self-identification by ex-untouchable castes. “Pariah,” though it is the name for a specific South Indian untouchable caste, is also a term that signals Dalitness avant la lettre. Hannah Arendt uses the term to describe figures of abjection and social exclusion, such as the Jew, for instance.11 The Pariah Problem addresses the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, when the “problem” of untouchability acquired new visibility due to colonial intervention, missionary activism, and Dalit self-representation. However, dominant frames of disclosure and deniability succeeded in presenting South Indian untouchability as a problem of religious repugnance, rather than coerced labor and material deprivation. The Pariah Problem is concerned with how untouchability was redefined and its...
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